Developing Linguistic Skills in English: A Communicative Approach
TOPIC 3: DEVELOPING LINGUISTIC SKILLS: LISTENING COMPREHENSION AND EXPRESSION, WRITTEN COMPREHENSION AND EXPRESSION. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN ENGLISH
1. Introduction
Over the years, the approach to language and communication has undergone various changes in terms of its concept and how it should be acquired and developed in students. The most recent model is based on the Communicative Approach, whose main aim is to make students communicatively competent. In this way, they should learn not about a language but how to use a language, developing the four main skills that are worked on when teaching a Foreign Language: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. This order corresponds with the natural order of language acquisition.
This idea is also related to the Organic Law of Education known as LOE 2/2006 (3rd of May), recently modified by LOMLOE 3/2020 (29th of December), which states that “a student should be competent in at least two or more languages”. Furthermore, the national Educative Curriculum also establishes some important aspects that can be seen in RD 157/2022 (1st of March) and more specifically designed in the Madrid Autonomous Community, in D 61/2022 (13th of July), which has four blocks of content that will lead students to achieve communicative ability.
In this topic, I will discuss the main features of the four skills already mentioned (Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing), emphasizing the different stages that are essential to work progressively, as well as some techniques and activities to be carried out. Then, I will move on to explain what Communicative Competence is. Finally, I will compile the main ideas in a conclusion and a bibliography with the main resources used for this topic.
2. Linguistic Skills
As far as language and communication are concerned, we can delve into the four main skills, which, depending on how we classify them, can be grouped as follows:
- In relation to the medium: Listening and speaking are aural, and reading and writing are visual.
- In relation to the activity being done: Speaking and writing are productive skills, while listening and reading are receptive skills.
Having explained this brief classification, I will move on to analyze the skills following the natural order of acquisition in which they are developed in the mother tongue, where aural skills precede visual skills. Therefore, I will start by talking about Listening and Speaking.
3. Oral Skills: From Listening to Speaking
Listening is the skill most frequently used. We receive around 90% of information through listening to one another or from recorded materials. However, to interpret what is heard, we need to bring out our linguistic knowledge. This is why listening to a target language is one of the hardest skills to learn, and students must spend as much time as possible training it through songs, rhymes, games, etc. This idea is established in D 61/2022, specifically in its block of contents: communication. Moreover, Harmer states that, when training this skill, it is important to carry out activities that have a purpose so that students feel motivated in listening.
So, if listening is the first skill to be developed, how can we, as teachers, provide students with valuable strategies to do it efficiently?
Firstly, we must give our students enough practice in both extensive and intensive listening. Regarding extensive listening, children listen for pleasure since the language level is within the students’ capacity. On the other hand, intensive listening is the most common practice used in schools, where students are asked to collect or organize as much information as possible.
Secondly, according to what has been recently explained, if, as teachers, we follow different steps to introduce listening activities in our classroom, the process will ease its acquisition.
Authors such as Albuquerque make a distinction among three main stages:
- Pre-listening Stage: In this stage, usually, a purpose is presented, and vocabulary games are developed to increase the amount of language recognized at first hearing.
- While-listening Stage: In this stage, students listen to the audio twice. During the first time, students focus on general understanding, and on the second, they are required to extract more specific information in activities such as diagram competition or matching.
- Post-listening Stage: In this last stage, students carry out activities to consolidate the knowledge gained from listening to use in other contexts. Frequently, this stage is used for evaluating comprehension.
Having explained the main features of the listening skill, I will now deal with the second oral skill: Speaking.
Savignon defined speaking as the production of verbal utterances to convey meaning.
When working on speaking skills, we cannot forget Hadley, who states that balanced teaching requires a combination of language input, structured output, and communicative output:
Language input deals with providing learners with the required material to begin producing language alone. A clear example could be the language they hear and read outside class.
Structured output focuses on students selecting the correct way to say something.
Communicative output makes learners complete a task using the knowledge they have already acquired in the target language. An activity to carry out with 4th-grade students could be developing a travel plan with scenarios they might encounter during the trip, such as ordering food in a restaurant or asking for directions.
For this reason, as well as when dealing with the listening skill, the speaking process can be divided into three stages:
The presentation stage should introduce new vocabulary. The practice stage is usually divided into a set of activities from very structured to less structured ones. I would like to highlight that these activities should include as much “student talk time” as possible. And finally, in the production stage, students use language more freely through jigsaw or information gap activities.
Now that I have considered the aural skills, I will go on to develop the visual skills: Reading and Writing.
4. Written Skills: From Reading to Writing
At first, students are more frequently exposed to oral language, and once it is well acquired, reading and writing skills will be deeply worked on in the classroom.
Before giving a detailed explanation of these skills, I would like to highlight a term coined by Butler and Turbill, “Literacy,” which deals with the importance of interrelating both reading and writing skills to achieve a great level of communication when the main aim is to transmit a message.
After this brief description of both skills, I will move on to the second part of the topic, where more specific details that we should bear in mind as teachers will be developed.
If we follow the order that should be applied in class, reading precedes writing. I will start by explaining this skill to highlight the main features.
Now the question is: How can we introduce reading in a foreign language to primary students?
There are three steps to follow in the classroom which allow students to work on this skill progressively. I will now make a distinction among these main stages:
Pre-reading stage: In this stage, usually, the topic that is going to be dealt with is presented, and simple keywords are shown to arouse students’ interest in the lecture they will read.
While-reading stage: In this stage, reading exercises will be introduced gradually, where filling the gaps, matching headings and texts, or small texts where they will have to retain key ideas are presented.
Post-reading stage: In this last stage, students should have selected and retained the main ideas to complete tasks. An example would be completing a dish template with the food ordered by some people that they would have read about in the previous stage. This information would be extracted from simple and adapted conversations.
To conclude, Harmer states that effective teachers provide students with some techniques to acquire this skill completely:
First, the person who reads should anticipate what they are going to read about. This can be done through skimming, which is a technique where a general view of the text is taken. Next, scanning is also of great importance as it is the step where specific information is selected to complete tasks. Afterward, recognizing patterns is also quite crucial as they help students to develop their writing ability later, focusing on structures and patterns that they have seen previously. Finally, the inferring opinion technique is also important as it will lead students to interpret what they have read to be critical.
After dealing with reading techniques, I will move on to writing, which should be the last skill worked on in class. Regarding writing sub-skills, it is crucial to mention that there should be a domain of the following skills:
- Grammatical skill: Students should know the grammar structures they have learned previously.
- Rhetorical skill: Have a command of some of the stylistic figures and social conventions.
- Stylistic skill: Command of the style or register necessary in a specific context.
- Organizational skill: Write texts with cohesion and coherence.
- Punctuation skill: Use proper punctuation as well as spelling rules.
As well as dealing with listening, speaking, and reading skills, learning situations where writing is the main skill worked on allow students finally to use language more freely. In this case, being able to produce free composition texts.
In this way, students should be provided with different techniques that will serve as a guide to develop this skill.
Depending on the level of acquisition they have achieved, simpler or more difficult structures will be introduced, so the technique can vary.
Now that we have a general view of the four main linguistic skills, we can state that their integration is essential to lead students to our final aim: communicative competence. Therefore, let’s define the concept of Communicative Competence.
5. Communicative Competence in English
Some authors, such as Chomsky, state that language is a set of sentences, each finite in length, created out of a finite set of elements. He also states that a speaker has a subconscious ability to use the grammar already known in their mother language to create new utterances in the foreign language. This is what he called Communicative Competence.
Nevertheless, authors such as Hymes said that Chomsky had missed out on the rules as he considered that speakers had an intuitive mastery of the foreign language they are learning at the moment. According to this, he establishes four sub-competences:
- Systematic potential: The speaker can produce sentences in the language they are learning at the moment, following learned rules.
- Appropriacy: The speaker focuses on the context and purpose to decide which type of language is appropriate to the given situation.
- Occurrence: The speaker knows how often a structure is used in the target language they use. E.g.,”I had my hair cu” is less frequently used than”I cut my hair”
- Feasibility: The speaker knows whether something is possible or not in the language.
Having explained these aspects, I would not like to forget the importance of Canale and Swain, as they also establish some competences related to communication. They are the following:
- Discourse competence: The speaker is able to produce sentences cohesively.
- Grammatical competence: The speaker knows how to create sentences grammatically.
- Sociolinguistic competence: The speaker focuses on social aspects to know how to interact in them in the target language.
- Strategic competence: The speaker knows how to produce sentences to be understood, whether they use verbal or non-verbal communication.
I am reaching the end of this topic, so now it is time for the conclusion.
6. Conclusion
As highlighted throughout this topic, our national RD 157/2022 is based on a Communicative Approach. It is essential that we develop Communicative Competence in our students, as it is established in objective “F” in the LOMLOE, “to acquire in at least one foreign language the basic communicative approach.”
To do so, I will bring in the development of the key competences. We can do a role play in the classroom in which students must plan a trip to outer space to discover if there is life on another planet.
As students speak to each other in English, they will develop their linguistic and multilingual competence. Moreover, they will have to make decisions and solve problems during the mission, so they will develop their citizenship competence and social and learning-to-learn competence.
And why not? If I carry out a Breakout where they must solve different tests to get a number code and go inside the shift, they will also be working on their mathematical competence.
Also, students can create an online newspaper using the free online application “Flipsnack.” They will hence develop their digital competence and their entrepreneurship competence.
All these learning situations can be carried out following the Universal Learning Design (ULD) by offering multiple ways of expressing themselves or representing information.
In my view, education takes place if there is meaningful learning, errors are part of the learning process, oral skills precede written ones, content is over accuracy, and learners take an active role when learning. As John Dewey said:
“Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.”
7. Bibliography
- Crystal, O. L. D. (2018). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (3rd Revised ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Hymes, D. (1972). On Communicative Competence (in Sociolinguistics). Penguin.
- Jakobson, R., & Halle, M. (2017). Fundamentals of Language. Andesite Press.